Sunday, August 31, 2014

My eldest daughter is in Scotland to spend her junior year at Glasgow University. Right now she is staying with Scottish friends for a few days before the term begins, and she posted this picture of herself exploring a stream near Loch Lomond.

I am hoping to visit her in the spring so we can go exploring like we did two years ago. Meanwhile, I can daydream.

The last time Medicare proposed paying for doctors to discuss end of life care with patients, Sarah Palin denounced it as "death panels" designed to hurry old people off the planet, and the measure collapsed in an explosion of political insanity. Now they are proposing the same measure again, and it looks like it will pass without anyone much caring.

The Parthenon Frieze is one of the standard "Great Works" of western civilization, but what does it really represent? A new book by Joan Breton Connelly, The Parthenon Enigma,asks the question:

Art history and classical civilization courses tend to teach us that the frieze represents the “Panathenaic procession.” The Great Panathenaia occurred, like the Olympics, every four years; it was a festival of athletic games and poetry and music competitions, culminating in a procession to the temple of Athena, goddess of weaving, war, and wisdom. Her statue was then presented with a new peplos, a robe woven by the women of Athens.

Thus, the frieze, with its horses and horsemen, youths and elders, men and women, and animals being led to sacrifice, represents Periclean Athens and a cross-section of 5th-century Athenians. The central panel on the eastern frieze, which depicts three women of assorted heights and a man and a child handling a bundle of cloth, is read as the culmination of the festival. The tallest woman is seen to be Athena’s priestess.

This theory, proposed by a couple of eighteenth-century tourists, has one glaring problem, which is that Greek temple art almost always depicted ancient or mythical events, not contemporary happenings. Cambridge classicist A.W. Lawrence, brother of T.E., wrote that if the frieze did depict the Panathenaia,
“this must have verged on profanation.” There are other difficulties (Wikipedia calls the interpretation “fraught with problems”):

Many of the elements we might expect to see in a typical Panathenaic procession are conspicuously missing. Why so many horses but no hoplites, the backbone of the 5th-century Athenian Army? What’s with the anachronistic chariots, a relic of Bronze Age warfare? Where is the wheeled ship-cart that transported the peplos, which was rigged to it like a sail? Why is a man handling the peplos in the climactic panel? (The peplos was woven by female hands for a virgin goddess.)

Connelly argues that this is all wrong; the frieze does depict an ancient event, the story of King Erechtheus and his daughters:

King Erechtheus sprang directly from the Attic earth. He had a wife, Praxithea, and three daughters. (The Athenian royal houses ran to daughters.) When Eumolpus, king of nearby Eleusis, threatened a siege of the city, King Erechtheus got an unpleasant oracle from Delphi: He must sacrifice one of his daughters to Athena to save the city. The queen, rather than cringing in horror at the idea, embraced it as patriotic duty. . . . Meanwhile, the three girls have vowed that if one dies, they all will—so the two who are not chosen insist either on being sacrificed as well or on killing themselves, possibly by jumping from the Acropolis. Athena then declares that the heroic girls are to be buried in a single tomb and that there should be a sanctuary and sacred rites established in their honor. . . .

Suddenly, upon looking at the “enigmatic peplos incident” of the eastern frieze, Connelly felt that she understood it for the first time: This was a family unit—mother, father, and three daughters of different ages—the family of Erechtheus. The cloth that the father and the youngest child (who must, Connelly decides, be a girl; the gender of the semi-nude child in the frieze is a subject of debate) are handling is not the peplos but a sacrificial robe.

I like this a lot, because I have always disliked the notion that the classical Greeks were particularly calm or rational. Their religion in particular has always struck me as more hysterical than serene. But I do have to say that the child on the right above looks like a boy to me.

If the coastline of Louisiana keeps eroding through the 21st century as it did in the 20th -- at last count, 1,900 square miles has been lost -- and sea level keeps rising in the 21st century at the same rate as it did in the 20th, this is what southern Louisiana might look like in 2100.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Since I was home Thursday morning, this task was assigned to me. At first Ben walked close to me, but about halfway to the school two sixth-grade girls appeared on the other side of the street and he sped up until we were about ten feet apart. I waved goodbye at that point and headed home. Friday Ben went by himself.

Another little squabble in the ongoing war over power lines erupted this week at the western end of Prince William County, Virginia, an area that has been transformed from farms to suburbs over the past 25 years. (I helped, in my small way, since I did archaeology on two big developments out there.)

Local opposition is growing in just the two weeks since residents found out about the plan for a 230,000-volt line, which would run for six miles from a north-south line in Gainesville. The line, on 120-foot poles, would run along Interstate 66, cut across a wooded area near Catharpin Road in the Somerset Crossing neighborhood, and then run parallel to the north fork of Broad Run and the Norfolk Southern train tracks behind the Greenhill Crossing neighborhood to an as yet-unbuilt substation in Haymarket.

Residents say the line would cut through protected wetlands, reduce property values of entire neighborhoods and possibly cause health problems. Jim Napoli, president of the Somerset Crossing homeowners association, said a quickly called community meeting last week drew 200 Gainesville residents.

“The community is very upset about the proposal,” Napoli said. “We didn’t sign on for these monstrous towers of 230,000 volts of electricity surging through us.”

Dominion Power spokesman Chuck Penn responded like this:

Penn said the population of Haymarket “has more than doubled since 2000, and during that same time period, the demand for electricity has roughly tripled.” The 2012 population of Haymarket was estimated to be 1,900; it was about 900 in 2000. “We’re looking at staying ahead of that,” Penn said. “In our business, we cannot wait until we need the power. You have to stay on top of the development.”

And there you have it. Nobody wants to live near high voltage power lines, but nobody wants to go without electricity. If you want to get rich in a big hurry, invent an affordable way to bury high voltage power lines.

Bobby Jindal has acquired a bad case of what we might call Romney Syndrome, the determination to become President at any cost. His latest stunt is suing the Education Department over the Common Core education reform scheme. This is rich because 1) back when Common Core was popular with conservatives, Jindal was a big supporter, and 2) Jindal has so far been unable to get his own state to give up on its version of Common Core. He has just decided that grandstanding against Common Core will help make him the conservative champion in the primaries, so away he goes.

I find Jindal ridiculous. He has alienated many of his friends in Louisiana by taking stand after stand that has nothing to do with the actual politics of Louisiana and everything to do with his own vision of the 2016 nomination contest. He is hardly the first governor to arrange his time in office as a resume-building exercise, but he is just so crass and obvious about it. He flaunts both his ambition and his emptiness. My favorite example was when Jindal gave a speech to the Republican National Committee and said that Republicans "can't afford to be the stupid party," then went on to embrace all of the positions that led pundits to drag out the "stupid party" label in the first place. (Viz., he said Republicans should not be the party of austerity, then called for a balanced budget.)

I don't really expect very much of politicians. But shouldn't a candidate for President have something to offer beyond the recitation of slogans and relentless catering to the whims of the party base? I hate Ted Cruz but I do believe he means much of what he says. After his epic battle with Wisconsin's unions, I think everybody knows where Scott Walker is coming from. Marco Rubio may be an empty suit, but at least he is handsome and stylish and seems well-informed about important issues. Rand Paul may have shed his most extreme and interesting positions as he gets ready to run, but I still think he would govern very differently from the other candidates. What does Jindal have to offer? The more he talks, the smaller and less significant he seems.

Friday, August 29, 2014

The plaque, dating from the late 6th century, was long thought to be part of a reliquary but recent scholarship suggests it is an ex-voto plaque dedicated to Saint Simeon Stylites, because of the inscription in Greek letters along the bottom of the plaque. The inscription reads "In thanks to God and to Saint Simeon, I have given." Recent research has allowed scholars to site the plaque in its original context and seems to lend support to the hypothesis of its votive function. The plaque was part of the treasure of the church of Ma'arrat an Numan in Syria. The treasure also contained a number of other similar small silver plaques engraved with invocations and dedicatory inscriptions. . . .

Unfortunately, the dedication does not indicate whether the saint in question was Simeon Stylites the Elder, who lived in northern Syria between AD 390 and AD 459, or Simeon Stylites the Younger, inspired by the older saint, whose dates are approximately AD 521-592, and who was worshipped at the Admirable Mountain near Antioch. However, the scene illustrated on the plaque suggests the origins of stylitism (from the Greek stylos, meaning a column), which was a particular form of asceticism whose followers spent their lives sitting atop a pillar. This form of mortification was first practiced in the 5th century by Simeon the Elder, who avoided worldly temptation by living on a high column. The saint is depicted as an elderly, bearded man wearing a loose hooded garment and with a large shell above his head. He is perched atop a column behind a latticed parapet. There is a ladder leaning against the pillar and an opening halfway up it to get in and out. The saint is holding a book and seems plunged in deep thought, calm in the face of the danger of the monstrous serpent that is threatening him. The animal is thought to be a reference to an episode from the life of Saint Simeon the Elder, when a snake came to visit the saint to request his help in treating his sick mate.

Bradley Birzer, the second person to hold the University of Colorado's visiting chair of conservatism, had this to say about his own beliefs:

But, what about that label, “conservative”? Well, let me explain—as I see it—what a conservative is NOT.

A real conservative is not a loud, platinized, remade and plastically remolded talking head on Fox.

A real conservative is not that guy on the radio who seems to hate everything and everyone.

And, a real conservative never wants to bomb another people “back to the stone age.”

My own tradition of conservatism—whether I live up to it or do it justice—is one that is, for all intents and purposes, humanist. I believe there is a line of continuity from Heraclitus to Socrates to Zeno to Cicero to Virgil to St. John to St. Augustine to the Venerable Bede, Alcuin, and the Beowulf poet, to Thomas Aquinas to Petrach to Thomas More to Edmund Burke. The last one hundred years saw a fierce and mighty revival of the humanist tradition, embracing and unifying (more or less) T.E. Hulme, Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Willa Cather, G.K. Chesterton, Christopher Dawson, Sigrid Unset, Nicholas Berdayeev, Sister Madeleva Wolff, T.S. Eliot, Romano Guardini, Dorothy Day, Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, Etienne Gilson, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Leo Strauss, Flannery O’Connor, and Russell Kirk, to name a few.

George Orwell, both shocked and impressed by the movement, noted in December 1943 that it was nothing more than neo-reactionary: a strange mix of traditionalism in poetry and literature, religious orthodoxy in ethics, and anarchy in politics and economics. I must admit, though I have never called myself a neo-reactionary, almost all those who Orwell reluctantly admired are certainly heroes of mine.

But as I see it, the conservative or humanist—or, the conservative humanist, if you will—only possesses one job and one duty, when all is said and done, and she or he performs it to the best of her or his ability: A conservative attempts to conserve what is most humane in all spheres of life: in economics, in education, in the military, in the culture, in faith, in business, in government, and in community. The conservative is, at the most fundamental level, a humanist, reminding each and every one of us what it means to be human.

Interesting, although that omnium gatherum of past intellectuals has some strange bedfellows, with some outright authoritarian monsters thrown in.

My broader critique would be to say that humanism as I understand it —I also consider myself a humanist — requires belief in the possibility of making things better. I obviously do not think that all change is for the better, and I rather dislike change for its own sake. The cult of Revolution, meaning the radical overthrow of the whole social order and its replacement with something completely new, has proved to be one of the worst ideas ever. By all means, let us preserve what is best and most humane about the past. But if you believe in humanity, you must believe in our power to reason and experiment and find new ways of doing things that improve on the old. If you deny this — if you insist the people cannot be trusted to find their own way and must always be guided by tradition — do you really have any faith in humanity? Some of the thinkers on Birzer's list, such as St. Augustine and Leo Strauss, had no faith in the human mass; in fact if I compiled a list of people I consider anti-humanist thinkers they might both be on it. To me, humanism means believing that human reason is profoundly powerful. It may often go astray, but to dismiss its power is to dismiss the potential of the modern world, and that seems to me a grave mistake.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

Yesterday NASA announced its decision to go ahead with the most powerful rocket ever built, the SLS, like this:

This decision comes after a thorough review known as Key Decision Point C (KDP-C), which provides a development cost baseline for the 70-metric ton version of the SLS of $7.021 billion from February 2014 through the first launch and a launch readiness schedule based on an initial SLS flight no later than November 2018.

Ah, the poetry of exploring unknown worlds!

Many space enthusiasts think this is a big mistake. Some think it is foolish to invest $7 billion in a new rocket based on 1970s technology, and they want NASA to leap ahead to ion propulsion, space sails, or something else high tech and clever. (Congress actually mandated that NASA re-use parts from the Space Shuttle wherever feasible.) Others think private companies could do the job cheaper; Elon Musk of SpaceX said he could do it for $5 billion. NASA responds that they are under orders from Congress and the President to launch a Mars mission in the 2030s, which means they need to start developing the pieces now, not wait around for new technologies that may or may not be ready in time. And while private companies have been able to do, at a discount, things that NASA has been doing for fifty years, private companies have no track record of going where no one has gone before; to see what can happen when the government asks private companies to build radically new machines, have a look at the F-35 program.

I still have my doubts about this whole Mars mission business, but I would rather we spent our money on new space rockets than more drones or fighter planes.

Our sink was leaking very badly -- actually "flowing" is probably a better verb for what it was doing. I isolated the problem to the faucet and began trying to remove it. But we have a garbage disposal and the space under the sink is very crowded, and I found it utterly miserable to squeeze myself into the tiny space and twist my arms into the pretzel necessary to get pliers on the bolts at the correct angles. As I was cursing my fate, my elder son chose to rouse himself from slumber -- this was 1:45 in the afternoon -- and wander into the kitchen. "Would you like to learn some plumbing?" I asked innocently. "Sure," he said. So I pointed to the bolts that had to be undone, handed him the pliers and fled. Since he had never done any plumbing at all before, my hopes were not that high. But ten minutes later he emerged from the kitchen with the old rusty faucet in his hand, saying, "Got it."

This etching depicts the "A View of the Fire-workes and Illuminations at his Grace the Duke of Richmond's at White-Hall and on the River Thames, on Monday 15 May 1749, Perform'd by the direction of Charles Frederick Esq."

Should you seek it out on the internet, you will find it almost invariably associated with Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, also first performed in the spring of 1749. In fact wikipedia transcribes the title of this etching as "Handel's Fireworks Music, performed at his GRACE the Duke of RICHMOND'S at WHITEHALL and on the River Thames on Monday 15 May 1749. Performed by the direction of Charles Fredrick Esq." Which is not at all what the original says.

However, the date on this etching is clearly May 15, and the generally accepted date for Handel's premier is April 27, not to mention that this is not the royal fireworks, but those of the Duke of Richmond.

And, Handel's royal fireworks are said by all the usual sources to have been in Green Park, not Whitehall. So, a mystery; were there two sets of spectacular fireworks in London to celebrate the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, or just one?

Part of the lore of Handel's first performance is that it went badly because it rained and one of the pavilions caught fire; could this have been a repeat staged a few weeks later in better weather? Any experts in 18th-century Britain out there who might be able to help?

UPDATE

A friend sent me newspaper articles from 1749 that show there were indeed two separate sets of fireworks, so this picture does not show the one for which Handel composed his music.

Huge hydroelectric dams are not cost-effective and we should stop building them. The projected costs of the biggest contemporary dams run into the tens of billions, but even those numbers are inadequate; the average big dam costs 44% more than projected. The money borrowed to build huge dams became a terrible financial burden on Mexico, Turkey, Brazil and other places, partly because of currency fluctuations. And that's before we get into the social cost of uprooting tens of thousands of people from fertile riverbanks and moving them to dry land. Consider the 57,000 Tonga people relocated in 1956 to build a dam on the Zambezi River between Zimbabwe and Zambia:

Construction of the Kariba Dam, which relied on what was then the largest loan in the World Bank’s history, required the Tonga to move from their ancestral homes along the Zambezi River to infertile land downstream. Mr. Scudder has been tracking their disintegration ever since.

Once cohesive and self-sufficient, the Tonga are troubled by intermittent hunger, rampant alcoholism and astronomical unemployment. Desperate for income, some have resorted to illegal drug cultivation and smuggling, elephant poaching, pimping and prostitution. Villagers still lack electricity.

Dams are built because the costs are systematically undercounted and the benefits oversold. (What happened to the electricity the Tonga were promised back in 1956?) International development gurus have been fixated for too long on mega-projects that are supposed to “jump start” the economies of developing nations, but all our experience is that they rarely do. Huge projects like dams or steel mills simply do not generate the broad ripples that their designers envisage. Many small investments, broadly distributed, always work better. Plus, there are now better ways to produce electricity than huge dams:

Instead of building enormous, one-of-a-kind edifices like large dams, the study’s authors recommend “agile energy alternatives” like wind, solar and mini-hydropower facilities. “We’re stuck in a 1950s mode where everything was done in a very bespoke, manual way. . . . We need things that are more easily standardized, things that fit inside a container and can be easily transported.”

The biggest dams look so seductive, so dazzling, that it has taken us generations to notice: They’re brute-force, Industrial Age artifacts that rarely deliver what they promise.

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

In our ongoing mission to keep our readers up to date on the exciting world of gut bacteria, we bring you the latest on the possible connection between our heroes and food allergies:

Food allergies have increased about 50% in children since 1997. There are various theories explaining why. One is that the 21st century lifestyle, which includes a diet very different from our ancestors’, lots of antibiotic use, and even a rise in cesarean section deliveries, has profoundly changed the makeup of microbes in the gut of many people in developed countries. . . .

Cathryn Nagler, an immunologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has spent years probing links between the immune system, intestinal bacteria, and the onset of allergies. Back in 2004, she and her colleagues reported that wiping out gut bacteria in mice led to food allergies. Since then, Nagler has continued trying to understand which bacteria offer allergy protection and how they accomplish that.

In one of the latest efforts, Nagler’s team first confirmed that mice given antibiotics early in life were far more susceptible to peanut sensitization, a model of human peanut allergy. Then, they introduced a solution containing Clostridia, a common class of bacteria that’s naturally found in the mammalian gut, into the rodents’ mouths and stomachs. The animals’ food allergen sensitization disappeared, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When the scientists instead introduced another common kind of healthy bacteria, called Bacteroides, into similarly allergy-prone mice, they didn’t see the same effect. Studying the rodents more carefully, the researchers determined that Clostridia were having a surprising effect on the mouse gut: Acting through certain immune cells, the bacteria helped keep peanut proteins that can cause allergic reactions out of the bloodstream. “The bacteria are maintaining the integrity of the [intestinal] barrier,” Nagler says.

When you consider what a huge deal food allergies have become in our society, and how mysterious and alarming their rise has been to scientists, this might turn out to be extremely important.

Home from three days and two nights in Charlottesville, Virginia, visiting friends. One of those friends gave us a wonderful tour of the University of Virginia campus, of which I present some highlights. Above, the utterly bizarre sculpture honoring World War I airman James Rogers McConnell, known, according to our guide, as the Flying Monkey.

Homer, and a boy sitting at his feet, a pose that would not be chosen today.

One of the adorable animals on the old science building.

The highlight of the tour was the mural in Cabell Hall by American artist Lincoln Perry, born 1949. This is called A Student's Progress, and it follows a red-haired (Jeffersonian?) girl from admission to graduation and beyond.

She enters her first class.

Individually the figures are nothing special, but en masse the effect is quite cool. This is Halloween on the Lawn.

This bacchanal caused, we were told, a bit of controversy -- note the poor guy duck taped to the pillar. But since life at UVA is really like this, how could anyone really object?

More debauchery. So this was fun, and the trip was splendid. But now I am home and need to get back to ordinary life tasks like parenting and blogging.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Tutu Fella, one of the world's best-named archaeological sites, is a complex of stelae and associated graves in Ethiopia. There is little information on them online and that is full of contradictions about everything from their date to what they are. Ethiopia contains many of these "stelae fields." One of them, Tiya, is a World Heritage Site, but not even the WHC documentation states clearly how old these things are, who put them up or why. So, a bit of mystery for your amusement.

From an NYT article on the dangers of explosive dust in factories, I extract this little parable about regulation and democracy:

Dust explosions are readily preventable with engineering controls, ventilation, training and other measures. The voluntary, industry-supported national fire codes have urged these measures for decades, and they now must be codified and enforced through federal regulations.

In 1987, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, part of the United States Department of Labor, promulgated a set of regulations for combustible dust for the grain industry. This resulted in a significant drop in grain dust explosions and an increase in lives saved, at an acceptable financial cost.

Following a study that our board conducted in 2006, we recommended that OSHA establish a comprehensive combustible dust regulatory standard for all industries. The following year, it developed an enhanced enforcement program, but the critical component — a national standard with clear requirements — has yet to be created.

Despite the fact that a dust standard was one of the Obama administration’s earliest regulatory initiatives, there has been little progress because of a daunting rule-making process. Since 1980, a series of laws, executive orders and judicial barriers have virtually paralyzed the government’s ability to issue new safety standards. According to a nonpartisan congressional study, the process can take nearly 20 years from start to finish. Given those conditions, is it any wonder that a recent RAND Corporation report found that American workers are three times more likely than their British counterparts to die on the job?

These measures to keep the government from issuing regulations have come from both parties -- one of the most burdensome laws for Federal employees came out of Al Gore's "reinventing government" initiative. Both parties do this because American voters hate regulations. There is no more sure winner in American politics than running against "Washington red tape."

Are voters wrong to worry about this? I don't think so. I make my living helping my clients navigate one small part of the regulatory maze, and I can tell you that it is daunting. If I tried to explain to you all the steps involved in a complex undertaking like building a new highway or Metro line you probably would not believe it. It takes hundreds of dedicated professionals working for years if not decades to jump through all of the necessary hoops, and it costs tens of millions of dollars.

But what is the alternative? I think we got a good look at a world without "burdensome regulations" recently in North Carolina, where an administration determined to weaken the regulation of industry let Duke Energy oversee its own coal ash ponds. Environmental Cassandras shouted about the danger of this, but they were ignored until a major spill dumped thousands of tons of toxic waste into the Dan River. This led to a judge slapping Duke Energy with a demand that it immediately clean up all the ash, which is probably impossible, and the state legislature is now trying to work out a compromise measure. Compared to this environmental, legal, and political mess, is a set of comprehensive, detailed regulations really so burdensome?

Our industrial economy produces billions of tons of dangerous stuff every year; the leakage of even one percent would destroy us. We, as a society, cannot trust anyone else to protect us from those dangers. Our society also produces vast pools of capital that developers can use to rapidly level whole towns or blast away whole mountains. If we care about the quality of our lives, we cannot let them do whatever they want, either. And yet bureaucracy really is, I believe, one of the great banes of life in our age.

It is a problem without a solution; we can only grope forward as best we can.